Sports not the escape they used to be

They’re a lot of fun, sports. They let you forget about your boss, forget about your job, maybe forget about that pesky court appearance next month. Sports are bright colours, strong emotions and human possibility, plus commercials. As someone once said, there’s no better way to obsess over a perfect stranger’s hamstring.

So, maybe we should start this year over again.

Could we start over?

We are not even two months into 2013 and sports is off to a bad start. Everyone is either a doper or a fixer or a dupe, or maybe a murderer, and nothing is worth caring about. Nothing is real. Nothing is good. Please pay for your season-ticket package in advance.

Most of it has been building for years, of course, but it’s all hitting at once.

The year started with such promise, when the NHL and its players worked through the night at a New York hotel and managed to make a deal to end a lockout that only cost them 41.4% of their regular season. It was just so damned inspiring. Well done, everyone. You didn’t blow the whole damned thing to smithereens.

This qualifies as a win — or at least an overtime loss — that can be quickly forgotten because another game’s coming. That’s what saves sports; there is always another game coming.

But it has all gone downhill from there, or into the ditch, or over the cliff, whichever.

Lance Armstrong? The inspiration to millions cheated, as it turns out, and rather a lot. Also, he lied like a spokesman, even in his tell-all interview with Oprah, in which he claimed not to be able to remember suing one of his chief antagonists, former soigneur Emma O’Reilly. Also, he sort of made a fat joke and came off like a sociopath. It was great.

There was the whole Manti Te’o thing, which took the most inspirational story in American college football and introduced a lot of people to the term Catfishing. It involved an interview with Katie Couric and a different one with Dr. Phil.

It was more mundane when Nerlens Noel, a potential top-five pick in next season’s NBA draft, blew a knee playing his single NBA-mandated season at Kentucky, for no official pay. It wasn’t Erik Karlsson having his Achilles sliced open by a skate blade, but it wasn’t fun.

The NCAA, meanwhile, admitted that while investigating the University of Miami last year, their crack team of rule-enforcers basically bent the law like a rogue police officer played by Eddie Murphy. This has led for calls to fire NCAA president Mark Emmert, which means someone else might have to deal with the lawsuits that are poised to rightly cripple the organization.

The Super Bowl was great, except for the part where the power went out for 33 minutes with the world watching. Also, the commissioner went on TV that morning and refused to admit there was a link between football and concussions and Ray Lewis was asked what he would say to the victims of that infamous double-murder in 2000 and came up with, “It’s simple. God has never made a mistake.”

Meanwhile, the union claimed its players don’t trust the league’s medical staffs, with NFLPA executive director DeMaurice Smith noting that “A number of the physicians in the country have financial relationships with the team where they are quote unquote, sponsors of a training facility or have some other financial relationship. We want to make sure that our players are treated as patients.”

He said this as ex-players with mangled brains haunted the week like walking ghosts, thinner, preaching change, wearing sunglasses.

The game was pretty great, though.

Globally, Australia has had a rough go, between the once-proud swim team succumbing to what a national report described as a toxic culture of booze, pills and bullying, and the national criminal investigation that alleges organized crime supplied athletes in both National Rugby League and Australian Rules with PEDs and may have also leveraged match-fixing. That one was a doozy.

Of course, the real match-fixing is going on in soccer, where Europol recently held a press conference at The Hague to detail a 19-month investigation that uncovered 680 suspicious matches on nearly every continent, up to and including World Cup qualifiers and two Champions League games. Europol is no longer investigating, of course, having hived off the task to the countries involved, none of whom have the authority to arrest the alleged gambling syndicate mastermind behind the whole thing, Dan Tan, who remains at large, presumably in Singapore.

FIFA, meanwhile, has never been very good at fighting corruption, despite having so much personal experience on the subject.

This pulls FIFA ahead of the IOC when it comes to global corruption machines, though the IOC gamely attempted to pull even by eliminating wrestling from its program beginning in 2020, or nearly 3,000 years after wrestling became a thing.

This is an impressively global middle finger to give the world, since 19 different countries won medals in wrestling in London among the 71 who competed. It was ditched over modern pentathlon, which had 72 total athletes at the Games in London and whose vice-president, Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr., was on the IOC executive committee that voted to boot wrestling. This has been controversial enough that the United States and Iran actually agree the IOC was wrong, so hey, that’s a bright spot right up until war breaks out.

Oh, and Oscar Pistorius, another global hero, may have murdered his girlfriend. And Jerry Buss, the producer of the best show in sports as the owner of the Lakers for 33 years, died.

Bad year — and it’s only February.

Sometimes it feels like sports is growing out of control, with a spiralling series of nasty side-effects.

Maybe we could go back to 2012, when Lance first got nailed, the Freeh report nailed Joe Paterno, the NHL locked out its players, Jerry Sandusky was found guilty, Junior Seau committed suicide and Jovan Belcher killed Kassandra Perkins and then himself, and …

After graduating from the University of British Columbia, Bruce Arthur joined the Post in 2001 as a sports reporter. After covering the Toronto Raptors, he became the paper's basketball columnist in 2005... read more, its Toronto columnist in 2007, and its national columnist in 2008. His work currently appears across the Postmedia chain three times a week. Arthur was born in Vancouver, is married, and lives in Toronto.View author's profile